EARL BALDWIN ON DEMOCRACY

Southland Times, Issue 24012, 30 December 1939, Page 9

EARL BALDWIN ON DEMOCRACY

AN INTERPRETER OF ENGLAND. By the Rt. Hon. the Earl Baldwin of Bewdley K.G. Hodder and Stoughton, London, through W. S. Smart, Sydney. Price 2/6 net.

At the University of Toronto last April Earl Baldwin gave the three lectures now gathered into this small volume. The first section is a brief survey of historical influences within the English character and of the process from which has grown that unique fact, the British constitution. In the second lecture the subject is democracy, which the speaker defines in the words of President Wilson as “a stage of development .... built up by slow habits.” Earl Baldwin enlarges on this theme with characteristic insight, and in the third lecture passes on to the severe test which has been imposed on British democracy in recent years. He was speaking some months before the outbreak of war; but the shadow of Munich had' not lifted and he was soberly aware of the unsolved problems. His judgment on the League of Nations is particularly interesting now that the Soviet invasion of Finland has once again focused world politics at Geneva. “The theory of the Covenant,” he said, “was admirable and the machinery of the secretariat was efficient. Notwithstanding all our disillusionment I am glad this great and novel experiment was tried, and I am not dismayed by this first failure .... To bring 50

nitions (as they became), big, medium arid I’ttle, from east and west, north and south, democrat, fascist and communist, into one assembly and expect world peace to issue therefrom was pitching expectation too high and should moderate our disappointment. Men do not change their minds with their latitude and longitude.” At the end he reaffirmed his faith in the Christian values which remain the only true guarantee for the survival of democracy. The people of free countries, he said, “must strive with more insistence and passion than ever to make real the twin ideals of social justice and individual freedom.”

These lectures may not have reached the high level of Earl Baldwin’s speeches, collected in an earlier volume, for he is at his best when interpreting an occasion rather than an era; but they are valuable as the mature opinions of a wise man and as a statement of faith by one who has played a leading part in recent British history.